3/15/13
Hobbes
• Human nature is so self-interested and violent that human beings must enter into society to protect themselves from each other • Hobbes is attempting to find a form of government that is entirely immune to civil war • According to Hobbes human knowledge can never be absolutely certain, universal, or eternally true • Hobbes believed that Aristotle’s moral philosophy was “ignorant”: Hobbes says that there is no ultimate end or purpose to human life • Hobbes belies that we are naturally selfish creatures • He doesn’t believe that human beings have souls • He said the human being is a kind of machine: a machine that desires and thinks • We are machines tat have a desire for self preservation • Deliberation is the process of deciding t act upon your appetites and aversions • The word “freedom” simply mean not being physically constrained • He believes that human beings desire one object and then another and so on • There is no final good, final purpose, and final aim in life
3/22/13
Rousseau • He argues that the sciences and arts, far from being neutral or beneficial, actually made things worse: They have not only failed to improve the human situation, but they have positively harmed it. • According to Rousseau, science, technology and culture in general have made people less virtuous and less happy • His basic claim was that human beings are not naturally selfish and cruel, rather they have been made that way by the corrupting influence of their social institutions • Natural of physical inequalities- differences of age, health, bodily strength, and “qualities of mind” • Moral or political inequalities- those differences which “depend among a kind of convention” • Traditional accounts of the Origin of Political Inequality in Rousseau’s time: o Divine right theory o Superior merit theory o Social contract theory • Rousseau challenges all of these theories but he is also one of the first thinkers to realize the radical implication of Hobbes’ theory of natural equality • Rousseau’s “state of nature”- what the natural human being would have been like before the existence of society and government, and without all the artificial behaviors, thoughts, feelings, and desires that are the result of socialization • Rousseau thinks that socialized human beings have two kinds of desires: o Desires that arise from out basic physical needs- like hunger and sexual desire o Desires that arise from out intellectual or moral needs • The natural human being lacks knowledge and therefore is only moved only by the most basic of physical desires and fears • Morality is based upon natural pity • Natural pity is a natural repulsion or disgust that humans and animals feel when witnessing the suffering and pain of others • Rousseau thinks that this natural pity or compassion moderates or tempers our natural instinct for self-preservation • Rousseau’s evidence for natural pity: o Pity is clearly shown by animals o Literary example from Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees o Pity shown in the theatre • According to Rousseau it is only society that we learn to suppress our natural compassion and ignore the suffering of others
3/26/13
Hume • The main argument of Hume’s Enquiry I that human knowledge is severally limited • Experience is the only source of knowledge because the human mind is nothing but a machine that can receive, preserve, organize, and rearrange the information obtained through the senses
Section 1: Of the Different Species of Philosophy • Two kinds of philosophy o ‘East and Obvious’ Philosophy- the kind of philosophy that attempts to guide human action in the world o ‘Abstruse’ [Difficult] Philosophy- the kind of philosophy that seeks to understand human nature using reason • Hume says that most people prefer easy philosophy